The finiteness of time available to every human hinders him or her from treading the entire matrix of existence to arrive at a sound decision. In such cases, I think it would be better to toss a coin.

Of course, I would be working on the assumption that the coins in my right pant pocket are unbiased. I could test the coins for bias but then I would have to toss each of them infinite times. Let me explain: If I toss a coin six times and I get four heads and two tails, the probability of getting head is two-thirds and the probability of getting tails is one-third. If I tossed it two more times and got tails, the coin would be seem unbiased. But then, what happens if I toss it again? So, we have no choice but to toss the coin an infinite times to check for bias, where we would need exactly half an infinity heads and half an infinity tails.

There is also the assumption that the environment in which the toss is done is unbiased. The assumption simply discounts the possibility that a gravitational wave originating from the massive explosion of a star three thousand light years away might disrupt the space time continuum around the coin, thereby biasing the environment. Here again, I would working on the assumption that gravitational waves do exist though there is a high probability that they do.

There is always the possibility that there is hole in my right pant pocket and I lose all my “unbiased” coins. No problem! Most programming languages support methods for generating random numbers. I would be working on the assumption that the program language that I choose, has a random number generator which is random enough. But how can a non abstract machine generate something abstract like a random number? Well, I could always program it to generate a random number using a function based on user seed.

Using user seed would work on the assumption that humans are abstract entities, who are capable of generating perfectly random numbers. This would be in conflict with determinism, a school of thought which believes that everything, including human thoughts are determined. And by calculating the vectors of the Big Bang, we can determine every action or thought, past, present or future.

Now, that brings us to our final question: Would it possible to analyse a system being within the system?

To be continued…

PS: Thanks to KayB for asking me, “Why were you late for the Bloggers Meet?”.

And are you not,” said Fook leaning anxiously forward, “a greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?”

“A five-week sand blizzard?” said Deep Thought haughtily. “You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff. – H2G2 (link)

If human understanding is flawed and I am human, it could mean only one thing: The understanding presented here is also flawed. And of the many paradoxes in life, I have found this to be the ultimate paradox.

Yesterday, I was involved in a conversation where I was talking about “be yourself” over “try and emulate” i.e. whether to follow your own philosophy of life or try and be like someone. By “being yourself”, I cannot defend or prove the point of it over “try and emulate” because the other person is just being himself by trying and emulating, since he believes in it. Or in other words, he is just being himself by doing what he believes in, which is to “try and emulate”.

Having realised how my very own belief  holds out against me, I gave up. But then, I realised that there was a catch for the folks who “try and emulate”. Here a series of steps:

1. Select one’s top ten favourites from a list if people on would like to “try and emulate”.
2. From the list, find out what each person’s take was on the “being yourself” and “try and emulate’ argument.
3. Find the majority opinion.

Now if a person subscribes to the “try and emulate” philosophy, he should emulate the result of the third step. If the result of the third step is “try and emulate”, then there is no problem. But what if the result is “be yourself”?

Hi,

Yesterday, I was delighted to find that @IndhuB had an approach to life similar to mine. Though I had the same approach to life for a long time, it was quite recently that I found a formal term for it. I was introduced to the term by Bala , a co-worker of mine who works at Chennai. @Pruntz and me met Bala on the BB at Chennai where we had a discussion on GUT.

The formal term for this approach to life is Structured Procrastination. The term was invented by John Perry, a professor of philosophy at Stanford. You can read his essays here. And I just noticed that a new essay has been put up, “justifying procrastination as a form of perfectionism.”

I often quote William Wordsworth when I try to explain this approach to others. Speaking about poetry, he said it is an “overflow of emotions”. And I strongly believe one’s best work is always when one does it with a fervent fanaticism fueled by feelings – feelings of love, anger, utter disgust, contempt,humiliation, defeat and a host of others. And it quite easy to discern a work of passion from a work of necessity. For example, I instantly knew that my team mate @Prazy wrote a post on cockroaches in a moment of emotion compared to his posts on his trip to Hyderabad, which I feel that he did out of necessity. Needless to say, I found the former one a more pleasurable read than the latter. My best work, what ever it might be, has come during these seizures of emotion.

I wonder whether this is related to the discussion at hand but let me share it anyway. @Susam defined three kinds of students (or approaches) when it came to studies. The first kind would go through the book with the syllabus in hand and cover all the portions required for the exam without making an effort to understand anything. The second kind would make an effort to understand everything but as the deadline came closer, they would give up the approach and start boning up. The third kind, which I feel are the structured procrastinators, would stick the policy of understanding everything even if the exam is just a day away. I belong to the third kind and my marks are quite low because of that but heck, I enjoyed the high. There have even been times when studying a topic for an exam has led to a related topic in another subject and you might me find with a book on the different subject, hours before the exam! (Of course, this begs the question on what I was doing during the entire semester. Come on! We are engineering students, aren’t we?)

The people who have been at the receiving end of this are usually people who depend on you to get something done – managers and friends. I am pretty sure that my senior project manager back at Chennai would have been an at a loss to explain on how I would go without sleep for 48 hours in one project and then behave like a uninterested fool in another. I am also pretty sure that the members of my church in Vellore would be at a loss to explain on how I produced the best presentation that the church has even seen in its history for a Christmas program for one year and then produce the crappiest ever the following year! I hope I can tell them this year that I will not be able to create the slides for them.

And this would be the reason you wouldn’t find a “Complete all three books of TAOCP by 2010″ in my list. Of course, you will find “Read GEB in my list”. But there is no date associated with it. I might read it after I learn to read music. I might read in ten years. Or I might never ever read it all! I just have a list of ideas in my head, ideas that I would love to try out but which are waiting for emotion to seize me to grab them and create beauty out of them. Now, if you are going to argue that I am not going to get anywhere in life by this approach, I have two things to say. Firstly, it has worked for me till now and I trust that it will continue to work for me in the future. I will live out life as God or the Big Bang (No sides!) has planned it out for me. The only baselines are that I love to do something and I continue to do something about it. Secondly, I tried to change this behaviour of mine, both mentally and medically. It worked. But I was the most miserable guy on the planet – I was trying to be someone who I was not. After two months of not being me, I gave up.

I have been wanting to write a post on Structured Procrastination for a long time. It was in my list of things to do ever since Bala introduced me to the term. But I never did it because there was no reason – no emotion! But I am doing it now (I will be posting this mail on my blog) since I am happy to know that @IndhuB shares this view! As I say, passion is the fuel that I run on!!

Coming to the other things, I think I will put down a record of the OK conversations between @Susam and me for “posterity”. So, here are few of them…

S: Why did you get up?
W: To wash my hands.
S: OK

W: Why are you getting tea?
S: To drink.
W: OK.

S: Why are you reading Hamlet?
W: Because it is beautiful.
S: OK

This entire OK business was started by @Susam. On IRC at work, I would very excitedly say something and he would respond with a simple “OK” and I would go “Is that all you can say?”. I am getting back at him. Now, when he says some blah blah, I respond with a simple “OK”. By the way, don’t these OK conversation look like koans!!? Pretty soon, @Susam and me would be conversing in a totally indiscernible way! So you see, Zen is the ultimate way to go! Ah! This reminds me of another incident that took place yesterday…

There was a water bottle in the room and I asked @Susam to pass it over. He took the bottle, opened it and took a sip and the handed it over to me. I remarked that it was a very rude thing to do. He replied, “In Hinduism, food gets converted prasad when tasted by god. So, I wanted to give you prasad.”

And so, one of my secondary tasks this week would be to demolish this entire image which @Susam the great blah blah, protector and keeper of the laws of the universe, has built in the last three years in our work place. I intend to show the world on how evil “god” can be… T-5 days and counting!

By the way, the object that we observed from the top of the water tank could be Iridium. I found this on the Wikipedia page – “The satellites are frequently visible in the night sky as satellite flares – a phenomenon typically observed as short-lived bright flashes of light.” And what we saw perfectly matches this image of a satellite flare and this long exposure shot of an Iridium satellite flare. So, I think there is enough evidence to conclude that we did see one of the satellites of the Iridium constellation. I do not have access to the NASA Skywatch applet on this computer. So, can someone please look up the information and make a note of the satellite that passed over us?

@Kart, I would still like to know what the word is for buying time to come up with an answer by asking the question again. Please let us know if you know of the answer.

@Pruntz, it seems that people in your company have no taste for aesthetics. This actually comes as a surprise to me as Donald Knuth is at Stanford! Where the hell is the “Justify” option in the Gmail rich text editor?

See you guys soon on freenode and in person week after next, or maybe next week.

W.

This is a mail that I sent to Math Monkeys today. I share it here as some of us would relate to it. Names have been replaced with twitter identities. Some parts of the mail have been changed due to privacy concerns.

Absolute Truth

“You need to get out of the Matrix.”

“How will I know that the thing that I get into, after I get out of the Matrix, is not another Matrix?”

“That’s what happens in the movie. Sion was another system.”

“So, Morpheus completely wasted Neo’s time.”

“Maybe it is like this: You come out of the Matrix and then get out of the outer Matrix and so on. Each generation hands over the baton to the other. You need to find the absolute truth.”

“Absolute Truth? What is absolute truth? How can something be absolute?”

“Let me define it this way: The absolute truth is that the absolute truth exists.”

“How do you prove that this is the absolute truth and it is true?”

“You are right. Then let me redefine absolute truth: The absolute truth is that there exists an absolute truth for which no proof exists…”

“I had once thought on a similar problem. How do you prove a theorem whose statement is: This theorem cannot be proved.”

“Let’s see. If the statement is true, the theorem holds. If the statement is false, the theorem can be proved. That’s a contradiction. If the theorem is true, well, it can not be proved. Hmm…”

“Hmm…”

Proof For God

“Well, Ramanujam did not need a proof for the existence of God. He never bothered about rigorous proofs, even in mathematics.”

“Hmm…”

“However, many mathematicians did not believe in God. There is no proof.”

“You don’t need a proof to show that God exists. That is why it is called ‘faith’. Do you believe that George Bush exists?”

“Yes. I have not seen him. But there is an experiment to prove whether he exists or not, which might involve travelling to White House and verifying it.”

“I can give you an experiment which will establish that God exists. You need to be a good person. And after you die, you will be resurrected on the day of Judgement and you will get to meet him.”

“But I need a proof that God exists in this life time.”

“I think it would be unfair to add restrictions like this. What if I say that you cannot travel out of the country yet you need to establish the fact that George Bush exists?”

“I will meet him when he comes here.”

“When you die, you will have a concious thought. When you die and you are resurrected on the day of judgement, your next conscious thought will be in the presence of God.”

“But how do I see him here?”

“He is everywhere. He is omnipresent. Different people have different ways of talking about God. Let me stick to the Christian version. You cannot see God because you are sinful. God is sinless and therefore you cannot exist in his presence.”

“Hmm…”

“I have a problem with people asking for a proof for God. You can choose to believe in God or you can choose not to. But why do you need a proof? Isn’t it called ‘faith’?” (Pulls out his cellphone) “In the Bible, faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“Hardy conjectured that God does not exist and he believed his conjecture to be true.”

“Rene Descartes came up with a syllogism to show that the supernatural does exist.”

Origin of Mathematics

“The beauty of mathematics is that it works with axioms we have chosen. We choose some axioms which we believe to be true and use these axioms to prove other facts called theorems. In Physics, these basic axioms are hidden from us. We hypothesize laws to explain the universe.”

“Regardless of the question on whether mathematics would exist or not in platonic world, I think mathematics can be possible only as a result of our interaction with the universe.”

“That’s fine. We can have a philosophical debate over that. But here, I am explaining why we can rely on the mathematical proofs more than the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be modified or changed, when we discover something new which is not consistent with the laws.”

“I would like to conduct a psychological experiment. Say, we create a neural electronic interface in which the environment presented to the human is just a plain landscape with a grid on it. Will the person come up with numbers?”

“If there is a grid, there are squares.”

“I wanted a grid to give the sensation of movement. If there is no grid, he might not have the sense of motion.”

“And if there is motion, he would be able to know speed.”

“But will he be able to come up with numbers? I see two trees now. I count them. Then I see three of them. I add it and come up with addition. Will you be able to come up numbers in such a landscape?”

“Hmm….. This brings a question in my mind. Can there be a life where mathematics is different from ours? Where, they can predict the next prime intuitively? We have a limitation. We cannot distinguish between areas as easily as we do with lengths. For example, I have a grid of 2 X 5 stones and another grid of 4 X 3 stones. How will you say which one is bigger just by observing the area they cover?”

“Hmm…”

“I wonder how mathematics would have evolved if we had that ability. In many factorization problems, this ability can be used to solve some problems.”

When I was in the fourth semester, I had a paper which on electrical engineering and control systems. Out of the five chapters, the last two were on control systems while the rest were on electrical engineering. That would be my brief, very brief, brush with control systems. For those who are reading this and are not familiar with control systems, let me make a brief attempt at explaining it. The area of control systems deals with the study of the response of a system to one or more inputs. Control systems attempt to study how various parameters in the system can affect the system. For example, we can study how the system would react if the parameters influenced it one after the other (in series) or all at the same time (in parallel). Feedback mechanisms, in which the response produced is looped back to the system, is also analyzed.

One of the most common examples used in the study of control systems is that of a surface to air missile. Once the initial co-ordinates of an enemy target are acquired, these are fed to the missile and launched. Once in the air, the missile might use its own radar or ground based radar systems to continuously receive information on the enemy target. This information is used for guidance to reach the target. This would be a good example for a feedback mechanism. The radar data is continuously used to change the course of the missile towards the target.

It was quite unusual of my friend to quietly listen to crap talk. I was quite amused and mentioned this to his wife. That was when she told me that the producer of the “crap talk” was a patient at psychiatry. I sank to the bottom of my car seat. “She was a brilliant student. But she did not clear a few papers even after repeated attempts in the final semester. So they brought her here. Initial tests showed that she had very low levels of potassium and other chemicals”, another friend told me later. Can the presence or absence of chemicals cause changes in human behaviour? If you were to speak to people on hormone replacement therapy, they would have at least one incident in which they underwent emotional and psychological turmoil when they missed a shot or allowed their hormone levels to drop (or increase).

Neuroscience is a fascinating science. Though our understanding of the human brain is miniscule, the existing knowledge tells us that the brain is a complex biological and chemical entity. Well, the word “biological” seems redundant because on a molecular level, the brain is just another chemical system. The brain might be much more complex that the most complex chemical industrial process that man has ever designed but it is impossible to deny the fact that it is a chemical system which is subject to physical laws (as deduced from our understanding of the observable universe).

When we feel happy or sad or have any of the variety of emotions available, chemicals are being produced in the brain. These chemicals cause physiological and biochemical changes in the body which express these emotions. Every stimulus from every sense re-arranges some part in the complex chemistry. When we think, we fire thousands of neurons. When we take decisions or reason or exhibit intelligence, the essence of the species, thousands and maybe even millions of molecules are being synthesised, broken down and transported through the one and half kilograms of matter that we call the human brain.

Of the hundreds of people I have met in my life, I consider it blessed to have met a few. These folks have made a huge impact in my life and in my thought. And one of those would be a medical student from across the eastern sea. If someone were to do a comparison between both of us, there would be nothing much in common except for the interest in education and technology. While he is a conservative and faithful student of the Bible, I am a liberal rationalizing idiot. (I still have no idea how he manages to put up with me in spite of all the philosophical crap that I heap on him. That also reminds me of another friend who puts up with me.) In a particularly long phone call with him, I made a statement, ” Everybody behaves the way they behave as a result of their upbringing and environment.” The importance of the statement that I made did not strike me as important during the phone call but later I realised that I had just obliterated free will!!

I liked to study people. I used to do it for two reasons. First, it enabled me to help them with their problems (in case I had to help them with their problems and they allowed me to help them with their problems). Secondly, it helped me get work done. In college, I began to notice patterns in behaviour. People behaved more or less in the same way. And since the study of human behaviour is something that interests me, I began to formulate theories. The theories were constantly tested against real world behaviour and were constantly revised.

In a way, we all do this sub-consciously. Geeks behave in such and such way. Manchester United fans behave in such and such way. Khasi behave in such and such way. The Chinese, the British, the Americans, and the Pakistanis – we all have our mental pictures created. These pictures are created from our interactions in person or through different media like books, anecdotes, stories and news.

And I was good. In the first five minutes, I am evaluating the person. At the end of the five minutes, he or she has been classified into the many categories of my theories. If they have not been classified, they are being further evaluated to ascertain characteristics which will then be used to remodel the theories. And I was very good. So, was the MBA going to be in marketing or human resources?

Have you ever had a friend who thought in the exact same way as you did? Well, I have one. And so it happened that we never used to talk to each other. It was for the simple reason that we each knew how we were going to respond to each of the statements. The entire conversation would be played out in our heads. And when we met each other, everything was just understood and it was all silence. But the question nagging me was too big for me and so I called him. “If i-Inc (Intelligence Inc, a pipe dream of ours that continues to be a pipe dream and seems to have a high probability of being a pipe dream forever) were a reality, you will be in Personnel.” – I didn’t see this one coming!

More than physical or chemical determinism, I have come to strongly believe in psychological determinism. A person is sum total of his experiences. Everything that happens in his life influences his behaviour in the future. From his birth, he is influenced by parents, relatives, neighbours, friends and teachers, colleagues at work, men and women of history, religious leaders and strangers around him.

Can human behaviour be viewed as a control system? Can it be viewed as a system which has a very large number of inputs, feedback mechanisms and produce behaviour as an output (And behaviour is in fact a response to stimuli)? The system might be huge and our understanding of it might be very small. Yet, I see no reason why the model should be in trouble. If this was the case, the species existence can be thought of interactions between various control systems, which turn makes one huge control system. Can cause and effect explain everything that happens around us and our own behaviour? Has it all been determined? Is free will an illusion?

There is somebody out there who is undergoing the same trials and tribulations as you are. If you are lucky, you will meet them in your life time and you will sit, talk a lot and feel at peace. If not, woe unto you. I got lucky. And as we discussed everything under the sun, the word “exploitation” popped up. If an understanding of the strengths and weakness of human behaviour was used, wasn’t it exploitation? Wouldn’t the person with the greatest understanding be the best marketer to peddle goods and the best manager to get work done?

“Can you show God?”

“It is an experience. It is hope. It is faith.”

“What if it is a hallucination?”

“That would make it causal!”

Need I tell that to that old lady at Patna who hugged the stone dear when she declared, “Ram is my father! Ram is my mother!”, with the happiness of a million smiles? Need I tell it to the mother, who with unshakable faith prays daily with the Bible in her hand, for her son to be cured of the congenital disease? Need I tell it to the poor muezzin who faithfully puts aside some money for Hajj? Need I tell it to atheist turned theist who could not find any explanation on why his baby cried all night except in the science of spirituality? Need I tell it to the theist turn atheist who abhorred the hypocrisy of the youth leader who sexually abused him at camp? Need I tell that to the agnostic who did not want any of the trouble?

That was about them. What about you? You may choose to accept it. You may choose to reject it. You may choose to ignore it. Whatever you do, you action would be a sum total of your past and present and maybe even your future.

“How about pasta for breakfast?”

“What is the state of your mind?”

In the section “Knowledge Representation“, the article talks about the qualification problem: “Many of the things people know take the form of “working assumptions.” For example, if a bird comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that is fist sized, sings, and flies. None of these things are true about birds in general. John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969 as the qualification problem: for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there tend to be a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way that abstract logic requires.”

From the blog, “No sides. Only questions.”: “These premises are not absolute. They throw open a huge number of other questions. Other problems include definitions.” “These questions again lead to the same conclusion: Human understanding is flawed. It is a quasi-stable set of premises judged on another quasi-stable set of premises.”

The field of AI now takes defines intelligence in terms of rational agents. In the section “Intelligent Agent Paradigm“, the Wikipedia article says, “When the economist’s definition of a rational agent was married to computer science’s definition of an object or module, the intelligent agent paradigm was complete. An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents would be rational, thinking human beings.”

I think the definition is in sync with the recent attempt to understand economics and capitalism, “The Case of Too Many Eggs“: “So, what all the people in the world are trying to do is to find innovative ways to put others out of work. From the barter system to high funda stuff like sub-prime mortgages, newer and newer ways to put others out of work are being formed.”

We, as humans, have been trying to answer the same questions! Does it also mean that if everyone had unlimited time in the word, we would come up with every conceivable knowledge? And I am reminded of the quote from Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” The giants are too tall now-a-days!!

PS: Rachel is my girlfriend – a Dell XPS M1530.

The Grandfather Paradox
This paradox usually turns out to be first paradox which most people hit upon while contemplating on time travel. The paradox is also portrayed in the “Back to the Future” series of movies. I am reproducing the paradox from Wikipedia here…

“Suppose a man traveled back in time and killed his biological grandfather before the latter met the traveller’s grandmother. As a result, one of the traveller’s parents (and by extension, the traveller himself) would never have been conceived. This would imply that he could not have travelled back in time after all, which in turn implies the grandfather would still be alive, and the traveller would have been conceived, allowing him to travel back in time and kill his grandfather.”

A related paradox is the pre-destination paradox which attempts to explain on how history need to be changed by one’s modification of the past in time travel…

“A man travels back in time to discover the cause of a famous fire. While in the building where the fire started, he accidentally knocks over a kerosene lantern and causes a fire, the same fire that would inspire him, years later, to travel back in time.”

The film “Minority Report” dealt with the pre-destination paradox.

Omnipotence Paradox
This is one of those paradoxes which make you scratch your head once you have read it. It deals with this question: “Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even that being could not lift it?” If so, then it seems that the being could cease to be omnipotent; if not, it seems that the being was not omnipotent to begin with.”

Mathematicians, theologians and philosophers have attempted to answer this paradox. Quoting from Wikipedia…

“This problem led in the High Middle Ages to developing the concept of mathematical infinity, and laid the basis for infinitesimal calculus. Combining omnipotence with omniscience can yield the difficulty of whether or not God can pose a question to which he would not know the answer.”

And theologians and philosophers have answered this questions from various fronts.

Theseus’ Paradox
The paradox goes like this: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned [from Crete] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

There is a related argument in Artificial Intelligence which deals with human consciousnesses. Let us assume that neurophysiology has grown to a point that the behaviour of neurons(in the brain) is fully understood to create electronic replicas which behave exactly in the same way as neurons. Let us also assume that surgery had advanced to a point by which a neuron could be replaced by its electronic counter-part without affecting any function of the brain. After repeated surgeries, the entire brain has now been replaced by electronics. Will this brain contain the human quality of consciousness?

Have a great day.

Every opposing argument in a debate can be further deduced to two conflicting premises. These two conflicting premises can be further reduced to other conflicting premises. The problem here is that only one of of these premises can be right or wrong. And the premises used to deduce whether something is right or wrong is again based on other premises. The entire thing is a painful paradox. Human thought is flawed since the parameters used to judge whether something is wrong or right are decided by humans themselves³.

The idea presented above is a very dangerous thought which can damage any existing and non-existing social order leaving utter confusion in its path. So, on a personal note, I use two premises to evaluate any thought (idea) or proposition:

1.What makes a thought or an action good? If every member of the human species were to follow the action or an idea and there would be no harm in the propagation of the species, the thought or the action is good.

2. What makes a thought or an action bad? If a thought or an action discriminates against the equality of any member of the human species, it is bad.

These premises are not absolute. They throw open a huge number of other questions. Other problems include definitions. What is ‘harm’? Can a few members of the species be harmed for greater good? If so, are there baselines for this number? What are the premises on which these baselines should be decided? What is greater good? These questions again lead to the same conclusion: Human understanding is flawed. It is a quasi-stable set of premises judged on another quasi-stable set of premises.

If human understanding is flawed and I am human, it could mean only one thing: The understanding presented here is also flawed. And of the many paradoxes in life, I have found this to be the ultimate paradox.

Footnotes:
1. I have been asked by a lot of people (here and elsewhere) on why I don’t take sides. One of the major reasons that I do not take sides is that I like to analyze the reasons on what makes people take sides. It could involve a factors of which the major factor would be the environment. An understanding of these factors helps one to isolate the thought from the person. It is easier to work with people when you address the reasons behind their behaviour rather than addressing their behaviour. It takes time and it is a huge pain.

Secondly, just imagine a world which contains only theists (or atheists), or only liberals (or conservatives) or only Microsoft (or Linux). Do you think that it will be an interesting place to live in? Differences are an integral part of human thought.

2. There is a funny side to this: I can argue for and against both sides in any argument.

3. I might be sounding religious here but religion does not lend itself to absolutes. I have seen numerous debates about various issues in all of the world’s religions.

Feel free to agree or disagree. Whatever you might do, it is still subject to the ultimate paradox!!